Community resilience and response to changing water environments

This research project is entitled: An analysis of the social-ecological resilience potential of a waterside community in the context of changing water conditions: A study in local knowledges and resource governance along the River Adur. The study aims to understand how stakeholders or ‘communities of interest’ within one river catchment may cope in the face of these changing water environments, and what types of resilient or adaptive coping strategies are available to them and are currently deployed.

New or innovative technologies to support resilient, adaptive co-produced solutions are also crucial. Therefore, this study also explored the types of innovative technology that have already been adopted and how this knowledge has been shared or ‘transferred’ between stakeholders.

Project timeframe

This project commenced in 2015 and ended in 2017.

Project aims

The aim of this project was to assess the resilience capacity of stakeholders in response to changing water environments at a catchment scale. The case study area is the River Adur in West Sussex, which exhibits a broad range of changing water environment indicators.

Project findings

The empirical fieldwork led to four key findings:

1. Local community members, even those engaged with dealing with flooding issues, farmers and environmental activists, make a disconnect between their changing water environments and the public engagement approaches which support climate change impacts science. In other words, respondents talk of heavier rain, local flooding and land drainage difficulties but do not directly attribute these issues to impacts of climate change. These findings reflect macro studies which indicate public engagement fatigue with climate change science in developed economies.

2. The growing importance and influence of parish councillors on community resilience planning and resource allocation agendas. These councillors are voluntary, usually with no prior knowledge or working experience within these areas of expertise and are usually older people – the average age of a parish councillor is 63. A combination of austerity politics, embedding the Localism Act’s (2011) stratagem of ‘community resilience’ and an ageing population leads to a growing gerontocractic culture in local politics, particularly around flooding response and highways and drainage maintenance. This leads to new insights when we explore capacity building around community resilience.

3. Community stories, uncovered through this empirical fieldwork, reveal hybrid knowledges and resilient performances around changing water environments in which responses are triggered by experiential learning – triggered by exogenous events such as flooding, changing water quality, changing economic factors or through endogenous self-reflexive events – retirement, education, relocation.

4. We need to consider that impressions of water quality and user heuristics are influential. What factors influence our perception of a ‘good’ river and how far do these perceptions map onto scientific data? The results show that the lived experience and anecdotal exchange with fellow recreationists trump cautionary/institutional signage as being too remote from the quotidian reality of the riverbank.

Understanding vernacular, local, ‘micro’ articulations of resilience towards changing water environments is critical in helping to both understand the scale and range of responses of our natural resources in specific landscapes to a changing climate and also to identify how local actors interpret the causes of, and solutions to, changes in their water landscapes. Inherent to this is a pursuit to understand why climate change science still falls short of communicating to citizens the urgency behind adapting and responding to climate change.

The research has revealed that agency at the micro level resides within a cohort of community elders who undertake a range of voluntary activities where resilience to changing water environments is enacted. These voluntary activities, which are civic, social, political and environmental in direction, highlight that climate change activism involves a very different set of social actors than the existing literature suggests. As a result the empirical fieldwork provides novel evidence for rural gerontocractic praxis.

Project impact

The findings from this study will help those involved in water management policy and planning to harness expertise already at hand by generating new knowledge on how forms of governance, deployed throughout the riverine environment, actually impacts at a functional, grassroots level. It will also highlight where more support and resources to promote local resilience are needed.

Examples of impact include:

Community development and empowermentDevelopment and delivery of a community lecture to discuss the findings of the research, held in Steyning Village Hall, West Sussex on 12 November 2016. Since this point some of the residents of Steyning involved in the research have established a formalised local community group and together have submitted a ‘Local Green Space Application’ to lobby against proposed building development which would exacerbate their flooding problem.

Extending university to university networksThe funded Renaturing cities workshop has led to a collaboration with the University of Manchester and Salford University with regards to a recently submitted ESRC bid concerning therapeutic landscapes.

Connecting with other STEMM researchers and institutionsDr Mary Gearey was invited to present my community research work at the Institute of Material, Mining and Minerals on International Women in Engineering Day on 22 June 2017.

Educational outreachDr Mary Gearey was invited to present her research work to sixth formers at BHASVIC College Brighton on Tuesday 23 January 2018.

Gearey, M (2018 forthcoming) ‘Tales from the riverside: What community stories can tell us about sustainable water resources management practices’. Sustainable Development.

Awards and grants generated by the research

Best conference paper award

The ‘Tales from the riverside: What community stories can tell us about sustainable water resources management practices’ paper was first presented at the 2016 International Sustainable Development Research Society conference in Lisbon, Portugal, July 2016 and won the best paper award.

Travel grants

Daphne Jackson Trust Special discretionary Funding to support attendance at the International Conference on Sustainable Development, 21–22 September 2016, New York City, USA. £2000.

A Santander Bank travel award to support a research visit to UNIVALI University, Itajai, Brazil, 19–26 November 2016. £1567.

An EU training award, supporting a fully funded five day urban sustainability training school run in Barcelona, Spain, 12–16 February 2017 (won in December 2016, to be taken up in February 2017). £2,300.

Participation in an invitee only researcher workshop to explore ‘renaturing Cities: theories, strategies, methods’ in Goiainia, Brazil, July 2017. Costs covered by the Newton Fund.